So the faux desktop interface is more stylistic than practical, and it emphasises the relative monotony of the games themselves. The ruse is a bit thin, especially now that the fake software looks ancient. The idea is that you can play these games at the office without anyone noticing there’s even a “boss button” to hide the most egregious game elements. Crash Planning is a Bejeweled knockoff disguised as a calendar Cost Cutter is a quirky tile matcher inside an animated bar chart. Breakdown is a Breakaway clone inside a Word doc Leadership is Helicopter inside a line graph. While many games can be discreetly played inside a real copy of Excel, the eight-year-old game suite Can’t You See I’m Busy! imitates generic office software in your browser, then inserts classic desktop games. It’s an interesting preview of a future (and a present) where human work is mere decoration around automated labour. The only real change you can effect is choosing from four desktop wallpapers and four background MIDI tracks. You feel the condescension from whatever computer handed you this “work”, and you realise you’re neither important nor useful. You are constantly validated and “promoted” for your simple tasks. Stock photos of office work pop up, with headers such as “There is joy in work” and “No one ever drowned in sweat”. Randomised dialog prompts and document headings describe futuristic technologies such as biofuels, tricorders and gene doping, while the documents you “type” give self-help advice. It is as if you were doing workĭespite its retro design, It is as if you were doing work takes place in a post-labour world of “95% unemployment”. A desktop simulation’s unique relationship to the surrounding computing environment lets it play with the boundaries and directly provoke the player. While in almost any other desktop game, the player’s inputs correspond to some fictional or metaphorical outputs, here they map quite directly clicking a fictional dialog box is no different than clicking a real one. Desktop Simulation Gamesĭesktop sims imitate a typical computer interface, with a varying degree of verisimilitude. Each provides a different commentary on the modern white-collar workplace. Desktop sims turn the computing environment into a puzzle or arcade game office sims explore the workplace as a weaponless first-person shooter, RPG, or adventure and corporate sims work like top-down simulations such as SimCity or RollerCoaster Tycoon. Officecore has three subgenres, in rising order of scope: Desktop simulation, office simulation and corporate simulation. If the idea of playing a game that looks like your day job is off-putting, that already tells you something. Or you might even learn something about yourself and realise you’re approaching your career all wrong. You might find it useful for discreetly passing the time at a dead-end job. While the average gamer will never slaughter demons or conquer France, they will probably spend some time, maybe all their time, working at a desk, so here’s a chance to help them reinterpret a familiar environment.Īs a player, you might use officecore to work out your workplace frustrations. The job’s details are usually generic, its fictional results obscured to heighten the potential relatability. In a world where robots have replaced all human jobs, step into the "Job Simulator" to learn what it was like 'to job'.While many games explore exciting professions such as pilot, city planner or hitman, officecore focuses on the drudgery of a desk job. A tongue-in-cheek virtual reality experience for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift + Touch.
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